Tag Archives: chainmaille jewelry

It’s also the name of a brand new – never before configured – chainmaille weave.

And I’m the one who did it 😀

insert bragging rights here…

See…I had an idea.

Yea…me & ideas. Usually make the household run for the hills…

I’ve been playing with Celtic Visions, which is the core chain weave used to make those little flowers I’d been messing about with.

These…for a refresher…

I took the flower form, and turned it into the balls I then gifted for the holiday.

Here…have a ball…

And it’s also featured quite heavily in the holey grail/Tree of Life forms I’ve been developing…

Soooo…with this weave currently occupying the ‘hot seat’ in my head…

The muses LOVE to muck about with that hot seat stuff…

I really, REALLY wanted to sheet the weave.

‘Sheeting’ a weave, in chainmaille terminology, is when you add additional rows to a chain weave to make a larger-than-a-single-row chain of any chainmaille pattern. Useful for making armor, belts, bags, and other sculptural elements out of little metal rings.

If you haven’t already guessed, I’ve got a rather large weakness for sculpture made outta those little metal rings…

So, with the Muses fully fueled with starches (well, it WAS the holidays, and I DID cheat more than just a bit on the Keto thing…) and pliers in hand, I started to play with the pattern.

BAM!!!!!!

Dutifully, I posted a shot of the weave on my chainmailler’s group on Facebook, looking for someone to ‘name’ the weave. See…I figured if my logic strings wandered along these easy pathways, someone HAD to have configured this weave before, and I wanted to give it the proper name.

The enthusiasts I associate with in my group are big on keeping the names of patterns ‘pure.’ No sense in having a dozen names for the same damn weave, after all. We often quote the website M.A.I.L. as the leading repository of weave names, descriptions, and a LOT of tutorials.

Imagine my surprise when I find out this new weave does NOT appear anywhere on the M.A.I.L. website….

That means I get to claim it and name it.

In my mind, calling it ‘Visions of a Celtic Bastard’ is perfect, because that’s essentially what I did – I bastardized the original Celtic Visions weave simply by dropping one ring out of the chain form, and stabilizing it once it spreads to a sheet form.

My chainmailler’s group has gone completely berserk over this new weave. So far, I’ve had multiple deman…er…requests for a tutorial. Someone wants to take the weave and make a ‘badass guitar strap,’ someone else has suggested it would make a fantastic watch band, and yet another wants to do a complete chainmaille vest outta the stuff.

So…if you don’t hear from me for a bit, I’m currently ‘chained’ to my computer, writing a how-to for a new weave.

The pliers have been HOT, and the creation process boiling over in my head. The muses must have gotten a hold of some serious caffeine pills.

Nothing stronger, thanks. I don’t think I could handle THIS…

Got the Mobyzan hearts all lined up on Etsy and ready to publish, both the tutorial and the finished forms…just waiting until November 1st to do so, so October isn’t so ‘listing heavy’ when it comes time to renew the things.

I also started playing with the weave used to make the dice again. The first time I went ‘off the tutorial’ I created collars from a single strip of the weave.

These ones, in case you’ve forgotten…

And I have once again wandered afield with this weave to pair it with a different focal.

See – I wanted to see how Metal Designz does their kits. If I was going to approach them on kitting out either the Dragon or the Mobyzan, I wanted to assure myself that what they were sending people was quality stuff. So I bought a new tutorial I’d drooled over for a while called Her Majesty’s quilt and picked up a kit from Metal Designz.

All for research, donchaknow (at least, that’s how I justified the spending 😀 )

Nice kits, if I do say so – I’m happy they’re going to be putting together supplies for the Mobyzan.

The Her Majesty’s Quilt necklace, when constructed as written, however, needed a bit of a punch up, as I was slightly unimpressed at the length of chain winding around the form.

Enter the muses with the aforementioned caffeine pills…

Because the weave used in the collars and the capture of the crystal in HMQ are both square – I thought “Why not?” and mashed the two together.

Can my muses cook, or what???

If any of you want to rip this beauty off my neck…it’s up on Etsy here.

I really can’t help it…I’ve had some interesting things come off the pliers lately, and I’m gonna share…

When I completed the dragon tutorial, a couple of people in my chainiac group on the evil Book of Faces asked if there’d be a kit coming for this one. A kit, for those not in the know, is when a jump-ring supplier offers a packet of rings in counts and sizes that were specifically put together for the tutorial at hand.

Sooooo – I reached out to a couple of suppliers I know offer kits for tutorials they don’t own. Sadly, the answer was no. The dragon is simply too complex a build, requiring 7 different ring sizes, as well as scales, beads, and wire.

Damn. But the answer got my blood flowing for having a tutorial written that someone WOULD kit out. It’s great for the chainmaille community as a whole, as it allows cross-support between the vendors and the designers, and gives new enthusiasts the chance to build some really cool things with rings they KNOW will work.

Half my design work ends up in the ‘well, THAT didn’t work’ bucket, awaiting deconstruction. Or a new idea…

So I banged out a new pretty – simple (for me) design, and sat down to write out the how-to.

I’m calling this one the Mobyzan Heart, as it’s a mix of byzantine chain segments interrupted with mobius balls. Cute, in’nt it?

I have a favorable response this time – Metal Designz will be kitting out my work this time 😀

Not content with JUST making cubes with the Shippo Tsunagi weave – I tried my hand at using a single long strand as a choker. I think it turned out rather well.

A new conjure princess-choker also emerged:

This is my first attempt at different colors in the European 4 in 1 weave, and I added that step in the weave I find so very fantastic. Soon (as directed by purchases of colored rings) I see myself sitting down and crafting an inlay.

Lemme explain…

An inaly, as defined by the chainmaille community, is a simple sheet weave, usually E4-1, where a pattern is woven into the thing with different colored rings. Some people out there are coming up with INSANELY detailed stuff:

And, maybe one day, I’ll be that detailed, too. But for now – I think, once I’m ready to tackle a longer range project like an inlay, I’ll stick with something really simple.

Or maybe I’ll go back and finish the dragons…the gold guy still doesn’t have feet.